


When You're Lost

by NixBlaque



Series: Nostalgia Verse [2]
Category: SPN, Supernatural
Genre: Cuddly Gen, Hurt Sam, Mental Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-19
Updated: 2014-02-19
Packaged: 2018-01-13 00:41:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1206469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NixBlaque/pseuds/NixBlaque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean can be a little dense sometimes. Thankfully, it doesn't take him too long to get with the picture this time. It was time to do what all hunters longed, secretly, to one day do: settle down and really live.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When You're Lost

Sam was released from the hospital two days after Dean arrived.

The hospital supplied them with a wheelchair to get Sam out to the readily awaiting Impala, and the doctor provided him with a detailed list of instructions regarding Sam’s care – both in written and spoken form. Dean did his best not to get too fed up; reminded himself that the elderly man was just looking out for Sam’s best interests, and said a goodbye with a fairly-sincere smile.

Bobby had pulled the Impala close to the entrance, but far enough away that none of the nurses stood in a group around the door would pay them any attention, and Dean saw the tension drain out of his brother’s shoulders as Dean’s baby came into view. By the time he was pulling Sam’s wheelchair to a stop by the backseat, however, the newly turned eighteen-year-old was frowning.

“Why is she dusty?” He seemed genuinely confused, reaching out to trail his fingers across the side panelling. Dean slapped his fingers away gently.

“Please, like I was gonna drive her with anyone but you riding shotgun?” He teased lightly, trying desperately not to remember the distress and anger that had accompanied even the slightest glimpse of his baby in the day’s since Sammy had jumped into Lucifer’s pit. “She’s been tucked away safely in a garage for this past year, pining for you.”

Sam’s frown deepened. “And if I hadn’t come back?”

“Then she still would have been there.” Dean replied as honestly as he could, carefully keeping his gaze averted from where Bobby was fishing some non-hospital issued blankets out of the trunk, spreading them carefully across the back seat. “Right, listen. Enough moping – let’s get you in the car, and then we’ll find a motel for the night, alright? We’ll figure out the rest tomorrow.”

Sam did his best to lever himself out of the chair, but Dean was quicker than he was (always had been, when it had counted) and had him from the chair and onto the smooth leather of the Impala’s seat within seconds. His feet, bandaged and sore, never even touched the floor.

His brother huffed irritably, but Dean was fast enough to see the flash of relief on his face, the way he gingerly moved his feet as he shifted his weight – clearly, they were bothering Sam more than he had let on.

“Thanks,” He muttered, and Dean grinned a little bit. Even as a petulant child, Sammy had never let his moods get in the way of his manners – Dean could still clearly picture a grumpy five-year old with his arms cross across his chest saying thanks when their father had bought him a chocolate milkshake.

Dean patiently waited for his brother to get settled, slipping a pillow underneath his feet and ignoring Sam’s scowl as he did so, before gently shutting the Impala’s door, pretending not to notice the way that Sam flinched away from the noise. Bobby hesitated for a few moments, shutting the trunk where he’d slipped the wheelchair into it, before sighing.

“You know that I’d love to come with you, kid,” he said gruffly. “But I’ve left the salvage yard for too long as it is – I have customers due this week, and Jodi won’t be happy if I leave the pups with her for too much longer.”

“It’s fine,” Dean shrugged. Inwardly, he was more than a little relieved – he wanted nothing more than to have his brother back, just the two of them. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate everything that Bobby had done for them, because Dean wouldn’t even have come for his brother if it wasn’t for the other hunter, but it was the same selfish part of him that had chased their dad away when Sammy was sick as a kid.

Sam was  _his_  kid, he always had been, and Dean had grown up with so little in the way of things to call his own, that frankly, it was pretty normal for him to get possessive every once in a while.

“We understand. I’ll phone you when we grab a motel room, alright?”

Bobby nodded his head, rapping on the Impala’s windows to give Sam a small wave before heading back across the car park to find his own truck. Dean watched him go in silence, slipping into the driver’s seat of his baby a few seconds later.

With a grin on his face, he slipped in a Metallica tape and cranked up the volume. Meeting his brother’s affronted look in the rear-view mirror as he screeched out of the parking lot with a squeal of tires, he grinned.

“Driver picks the music, Sammy. Shotgun shuts his cakehole.”

 

***

 

For the most part, Sammy was a fully-functioning, entirely coherent human being.

Still, after all he’d been through, Dean couldn’t blame him for having his moments. It was only a few days after leaving the hospital that Dean began to register and file away his little quirks.

Sudden, loud noises left him trembling; the one time that they’d lost signal in the motel room, the sound of the static had left Sammy curled into a ball and keening. Taking him to a bustling diner (which had been a pretty crappy plan from the start, let’s be honest) had resulted in a concerned Dean trying to talk him down from a panic attack.

He didn’t like having his neck or stomach touched. Even attempting to eat red meat made him sick to his stomach. Sometimes, thrashing in the throes of another nightmare, he spoke Enochian in his sleep.

They were things that Dean should have expected. He remembered, with a distant clarity, his own return top-side. He’d been a mess, and Sammy had suffered a lot longer than he had. Honestly, he just thought himself lucky that Sam was even still functioning – he wasn’t sure that he would be.

More than anything else, it was those things that finally made Dean realise that the two of them were never going to be able to hit the road and live like they used to. They’d never be able to hunt monsters and ghosts, break into museums to search for cursed objects. They’d never spending a week wandering through the woods on the tail of a werewolf, spend days planning an attack on a group of vampires. It just wasn’t possible.

Not as surprising was the fact that Dean didn’t care. Hunting had played a big part in his life, there was no doubting it – he’d been raised to do it, been trained from the tender age of four to be the best hunter there could possibly be. But he’d also spent that time looking after his brother.

He might have defended their father time and time again, but Dean wasn’t disillusioned about the fact that he had been the one to raise his brother. His name had been Sam’s first word and the person that he’d taken those first, faltering steps towards; he was the one who’d taught his brother to read and write, to tie his shoes and ride a bike. He’d taken him on his first driving lesson, held him steady when he’d fired a shotgun for the first time. On Sam’s first hunt, it had been Dean who had knocked him out of the way of an angry spirit.

Hunting had been his life’s mission. Sam was his life.

As far as Dean was concerned, there was no contest.

For a few days after the startling realisation, Dean continued shipping them from one motel room to another like nothing had changed. It was easier to fall into a routine, carry on absent-mindedly as he tried to work out what they were going to do. Really, there was only one solution. They were going to have to do what all other hunters did when the time came: buy a house and settle down.

 

***

 

Three weeks after Sam had been sprung from the motel room found Dean returned from a grocery run to find his brother leaning against the headboard of his bed, picking absently at a loose thread in his jeans and staring at Dean’s phone on the nightstand as if it might attack him without a moment’s notice.

“Sammy?” Dean frowned, glancing between his brother and his phone as if doing so would help him see the link that he was so obviously missing.

“It kept ringing.” Sam told him miserably. “It, erm- Lisa. She kept calling. I’m sorry. I should’ve answered; one of them could be hurt. Sorry.”

Dean frowned, leaning over to pick up the phone. In the time it had taken to run to the grocery shop, Lisa had rung four times. If she hadn’t done the same thing every day since he’d upped and left, Dean might have been more concerned.

“It’s fine, Sammy.” He reassured, running his hand through the kid’s hair. “I’ll just phone her back. No harm done.”

He didn’t mention that he’d had three weeks to phone her and, even after her insistent ringing, he hadn’t done it. Guilt at how he’d left them, perhaps, or cowardice at what she might say. He hadn’t decided, but with Sam’s eyes on him now, he didn’t have much choice. Sighing, he shouldered the motel door open and leant on the railing outside, dialling the number from memory.

Lisa answered on the fourth ring.

 _“So you are alive then.”_  Her voice was terse, and she sounded angrier than he’d ever heard her. Clearly his plan of giving her time to cool down had backfired impressively.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Dean shrugged. “Look, I’m sorry-”

“ _For what, Dean?”_  She asked, her voice deceptively mild.  _“For not answering any of my calls? For leaving me to wonder if you were dead in a ditch? For not telling us why you left… for making us think that it was something that we’d done? Or for running out on us in the first place?”_

Dean winced. “Yeah, um. Pretty much all of that.”

Apart from leaving, but Dean figured that part was better left unsaid.

 _“I mean, God, Dean. We took you in when no-one else would have. Didn’t we give you everything? Why would you just walk out like that? Do you know how much that hurt Ben? …How much that hurt_ me _?”_

“Lisa, I’m sorry.” Dean sighed. “I wish it didn’t have to be like this, but it does. There’s no way around it. I never should have gone to you in the first place, it wasn’t fair.”

Lisa sighed.  _“This is about Sam, isn’t it?”_

“Yeah, it is. He’s… well, he’s alive, Lis.”

 _“Well then.”_  Her tone was resigned. It was clear that they both knew how this conversation was going to end, and it wasn’t going to be with Dean heading back to Indiana. _“There’s really no point in this conversation. It was a given that if you even had to chose between him, and us, it would be him. I wish things could be different, but you’re right. This is the way things have to be. Just – you left some stuff here. What do you want me to do with it?”_

“Can you ship it to Bobby’s?” He asked, feeling like a coward even as he said it.

 _“Sure.”_  Lisa replied evenly. Her voice sounded thick, like she might be crying, and Dean felt genuine remorse for the first time. Lisa and Ben had been good to him – they didn’t deserve this. “ _Goodbye, Dean.”_

She didn’t wait for his reply before hanging up, and Dean didn’t blame her. It surprised him, how much it hurt to shut that part of his life away for good – whilst Lisa had been right, it had been an easy decision to make, the two of them had still been a major part of his life over the last year. They’d done more for him then he’d had any right to ask, and he knew that he’d disappointed them in the worst possible way.

There was nothing to do about it now, though, and Dean slipped the phone into the back pocket of his jeans with a sigh and headed back into the motel room. He only got a few steps inside the door before freezing.

“…Sam?”

His brother was sitting on the end of his bed, folding his clothes into his duffel with the military-like precision that he’d developed as a kid. Half of them were already packed, socks and underwear wedged around the edges of the bag to stop the clothes coming unfolded or creasing.

Sam blinked up at him in response to his question, his eyes rimmed red.

“Bobby can pick me up in half an hour,” He said quietly, and Dean’s brain whirled with confusion, unable to comprehend why Sam would want to leave.

“I don’t…” He trailed off as hurt bloomed deep in his chest, blinking rapidly. “Why?”

Sam’s hands stopped their movement for the first time, dropping to twist in the bottom of his hoodie – another habit he’d developed over the past few weeks, something comforting to him when he was anxious or distressed.

“It’s alright, Dean,” He said softly, eyes locked on the floor. “Honestly. I know that they must be missing you. It’s not fair to make them wait any longer. I’m not getting any better, so it’s not like it’s going to help, and Bobby said that he doesn’t mind me staying with him for a while.”

Realisation slowly dawned on Dean, and the hurt in his chest was replaced by warm affection.

“Aw, Sammy,” He sighed, shifting across the gap between the beds to settle next to his brother and wrap his arm around the kid’s trembling shoulders. “I was never going back to them, you moron. You’re stuck with me for good this time.”

Sam didn’t relax, shoulders still high a tight, but he did risk a glance through his hair.

“I won’t be mad.” He whispered, voice sounding choked up and broken. “It’s not fair to make you stay. Not when you have a family now.”

“You’re not making me do  _anything._ ” Dean said firmly, tipping his brother’s head up with a finger under his chin. “Lisa and Ben were good to me while you were gone, Sam, but they were never my family – no matter what you’re thinking, it was never going to work, because they weren’t  _you_. And you were all that I wanted.”

The noise that came from Sam was a distinctly wet-sounding sniffle, and all of his muscles seemed to relax at once, his body coming to rest against his brother’s completely, small enough now to tuck comfortably under his arm. The sound made Dean’s heart pang painfully in his chest, because Sammy _never_  cried – not since he was ten, and certainly never when he was eighteen the first time around.

“Sorry.”

The kid sounded simultaneously miserable and relieved, and Dean couldn’t help a relieved chuckle from breaking free, happy with the knowledge that Sam hadn’t actually wanted to leave him.

“Listen,” He said softly. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you – should probably have done it a lot earlier. What do you think about settling down? Getting a house.”

Sam didn’t respond for a long second.

“Don’t you want to hunt?”

“I’ve been – mostly – out of the game for a year, Sammy, and unlike some people, I’m not getting any younger. And who knows, maybe we’ll end up doing some in the future, but for now? All I want is me, you and a nice big house with a garage for my baby.”

Sam nodded his head a little, sniffling again.

“I think I’d like that.”


End file.
